the fatal net

come for the covid, stay for what's left of your life

Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men.

~ Giorgio de Chirico

What to do with this fresh new year, full of promise and possibility?¹

Besides keep up with all the covid news because I am way ahead of some of the reports and have started death cleaning. Not to be grim, but honestly I need to get rid of the things I don’t want my family to deal with just in case.

So, big stretch first of all, but there are other plans besides stretching and filling garbage bags of course. The walls and ceilings need to be patched, primed, and prepared for lime wash. I want to layer wash on the ceiling to make sunset clouds like a Maxfield Parrish painting — I wonder if it is possible? Is it like painting a fresco (another thing I have never done)? Should I add allegorical vignettes? I need to take down the ceiling fans, clean them, and make them prettier. The hallway, entry, and porch light fixtures could be replaced. There is a plumbing issue and some rot behind the kitchen sink that are a concern, especially since I don’t have shutoff valves and have to cut the water from the main source to work on it, and I have zero idea what I’m doing unless one counts YouTube videos, and I’m maybe a little scared the sink will fall into the cabinet.

Princess Parizade Bringing Home the Singing Tree - Maxfield Parrish with nice clouds, but I am having trouble finding a picture of Parrish clouds that I probably made up in my head.

Then there’s the ongoing purge of household items, a brutal Five Things plus Kondo plus Death Cleaning sorting method: keep, give away, donate, sell, or fill an entire roll of huge garbage bags. If I am not filling a whole garbage bag, I am keeping too much junk.

Also, I would like to figure out a flexible way to generate income. I need to start interacting more and being pushy with my writing, although my hope was for people to just float into it, descending like angels into my clouded mind’s cozy living room. I’m even more introverted since getting long covid, mostly because nearly every interaction is exhausting and maybe I gave up. I can probably do better now that it seems like I am having a little remission from the worst of it. Starting conversations even online feels awkward, like “hello, person I don’t know, I am a normal person and totally not a stalker, I just want to be friends, I like your writing, please read mine and like and share and comment and pass this along to a wealthy benefactor who wants to unload piles of money for my sweet words.” Usually writing is enough interaction — after that I am le tired.

Mostly I am hoping to capture mysterious butterflies and strange moments in the fatal art net and try to disentangle myself from the stupid net of long covid.

I hope by the end of the year that I have made paintings, sculptures, and finished the shadow puppets in the studio where now all my books are in boxes and all my tools and supplies are all over the place. I hope the ceilings and walls are patched and painted. I hope these are reasonably do-able things if I pace properly.

The kitchen goal is to get as much light as possible through the windows and fill it with plants like Kiki’s mom’s greenhouse. I brought in the container plants from outside for winter (brown turkey fig and tall hibiscus braid) and I like seeing them. I used a gift card to get a jasmine (Jasminum sambac) and a Scarlet Flame passionflower (Passiflora vitifolia) for the new window.² The ultimate goal is to make the best of things.

As fish are caught in a cruel net,
    or birds are taken in a snare,
so people are trapped by evil times
    that fall unexpectedly upon them.

~ Ecclesiastes 9:13, New International Version

1. I can’t add footnotes in a pull quote, but I wrote a thing related to art class and de Chirico a few months ago, and you can read it if you want.

2. the old window was probably installed in the 1950s when the kitchen was added, but most of that addition is in much worse shape than the parts of the house built in 1930. The new window is more modern but it lets in more light and no drafts, so I don’t mind the discontinuity with the rest of the house, this isn’t necessarily a restoration, more like a patch up and make pretty on a tight budget and with a flexible timeline because there are other, more pressing issues.

Anyway, this is what they should look like when they bloom. The jasmine is already blooming happily, and the passiflora is green, healthy, and seems to be growing fast — it was rootbound so I put it in a slightly larger pot. I’m excited to watch them grow.

these are like the flowers I got with Christmas money. Passiflora Vitifolia By Density - Own (not mine, Density's) work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=796333 Jasmine sambac Scott Zona, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons